TRENDING SCIENCE: Talk less to be liked? No need to, says new research

Let the other person talk more. Speak less so you can come across as more likeable. Do so to gain friends and persuade others, Dale Carnegie advised in his self-help tome ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’, one of the best-selling books ever. According to findings published in the journal ‘Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin’, we’ve been carrying around these wrong beliefs and biases for a long time.So, should we do more listening than speaking, or do most of the talking? The researchers asked this question to a group of college students. To be well-liked, the majority believed that they should talk less during a one-on-one conversation. This belief was mistaken.

Another group of college students participated in a 7-minute conversation with a stranger. This conversation was managed by a computer programme that specified whose turn it was to speak and for how long. It randomly assigned participants to speak for 30 %, 40 %, 50 %, 60 % or 70 % of the time. The subjects rated how much they liked their partner afterwards. Results showed that the participants were more likeable when they spoke more than half of the time.

“[O]ur new research suggests that, all else being equal, you should speak up more than you typically might in conversations with new people in order to make a good first impression,” lead author and social scientist Dr Quinn Hirschi, principal researcher at the Center for Decision Research, University of Chicago, wrote in ‘The Conversation’. “Research like ours can help people gain a more scientifically grounded understanding of social interactions with new people and ultimately become more confident and knowledgeable about how to make a good first impression.”Findings also revealed that people had different benchmarks for how much they believe they should talk depending on whether they wanted to be liked or to be interesting. They said that they should talk less to be considered likeable and more to be interesting.

“We think that others love talking about themselves, that other people don’t want to be approached by us,” Dr Hirschi told ‘Vice’. “But it’s a misperception that we have kind of about our whole social world that we should hold back more than would actually be ideal.”

She further explained: “I feel like there is this general stereotype that we have that others just love producing information, they love talking. But the data was suggesting that the opposite was true, that people enjoyed learning about what others had to say and learning about others’ experiences more.”

Dr Hirschi added in ‘The Conversation’: “It’s possible, and even likely, that completely dominating a conversation – such as by speaking 90% of the time – is not an optimal strategy. Our research does not suggest people should steamroll a conversational partner but rather that they should feel comfortable speaking up more than they typically might.”

Of course, more important than finding that perfect balance between speaking and listening is what we say. This is what matters most, and we don’t need the father of modern self-help culture to tell us that.